I Became More and More Removed from Aesthetics

     I became more and more removed from aesthetics.  I wanted to
find another order, another value for man in nature.  He was no longer
to be the measure of all things, no longer to reduce everything to his
own measure, but on the contrary, all things and man were to be like
nature, without measure.  I wanted to create new appearances, extract
new forms from man.  This tendency took shape in 1917 in my "objects."
Alexandre Partens wrote of them in the Almanach Dada: "It was the
distinction of Jean Arp to have at a certain moment discovered the true
problem in the craft itself.  This allowed him to feed it with a new,
spiritual imagination.  He was no longer interested in improving, for-
mulating, specifying an aesthetic system.  He wanted immediate and
direct production, like a stone breaking away from a cliff, a bud
bursting, an animal reproducing.  He wanted objects impregnated with
imagination and not museum pieces, he wanted animalesque objects with
wild intensities and colors, he wanted a new body among us which would
suffice unto itself, an object which would be just as well off squatting
on the corners of tables as nestling in the depths of the garden or
staring at us from the wall... To him the frame and later the pedestal
seemed to be useless crutches..."
     Even in my childhood, the pedestal enabling a statue to stand, the
frame enclosing the picture like a window, were for me occasions for
merriment and mischief, moving me to all sorts of tricks.  One day I
attempted to paint on a windowpane a blue sky under the houses that I
saw through the window.  Thus the houses seemed to hang in mid-air.
Sometimes I took our pictures out of their frames and looked with
pleasure at these windows hanging on the wall.  Another time I hung
up a frame in a little wooden shack, and sawed a hole in the wall
behind the frame, disclosing a charming landscape animated by men
and cattle.  I asked my father for his opinion of the work I had
just completed.  He gave me a strange, somewhat suprised look.  As
a child I also took pleasure in standing on the pedestal of a statue
that had collapsed and mimicking the attitude of a modest nymph.
     Here are a few of the names of my dadaist objects: Adam's Head,
Articulating Comma, Parrot Imitating the Thunder, Mountain with Shirt
Front of Ice, Spelling Furniture, Egg Board, Navel Bottle.  The
fragility of life and human works was converted with the dadaists into
black humor.  No sooner is a building, a monument completed than it
begins to decay, fall apart, decompose, crumble.  The pyramids, temples,
cathedrals, the paintings of the masters, are convincing proof of this.
And the buzzing of man does not last much longer than the buzzing of 
the fly spiraling so enthusiastically around my baba au rhum.
     Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover
the natural and unreasonable order.  Dada wanted to replace the logical
non-sense of the men of today by the illogically senseless.  That is
why we pounded with all our might on the big drum of dada and trumpeted
the praises of unreason.  Dada gave the Venus de Milo an enema and per-
mitted Laocoon and his sons to relieve themselves after thousands of 
years of struggle with the good sausage Python.  Philosophies have less
value for dada than an old abandoned toothbrush, and dada abandons them
to the great world leaders.  Dada denounced the infernal ruses of the
official vocabulary of wisdom.  Dada is for the senseless, which does
not mean non-sense.  Dada is senseless like nature.  Dada is for nature
and against art.  Dada is direct like nature.  Dada is for infinite
sense and definite means.

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